Black Robe Critique, By Andrew Baker

· The movie I chose was “Black Robe”.

· The IMDB Plot Summary describes this movie by: “In the 17th century a Jesuit priest and a young companion are escorted through the wilderness of Quebec by Algonquin Indians to find a distant mission in the dead of winter. The Jesuit experiences a spiritual journey while his young companion falls in love with the Algonquin chief's beautiful daughter underneath the imposing and magnificent mountains. Dread and death follows them upriver.”

· I don’t think that that summary really captures what the movie was truly about.

· More importantly, in my opinion, I think that it was more to do with religion and the natives’ refusal to assimilate.

· Throughout the movie the story shows both sides: the Algonquins and the “Black robe”. I think that this was a masterfully contrasted in the movie, by showing the priest’s religiosity suffering and also set up the pride that the natives had in general. It really symbolized the fact that the natives really weren’t susceptible to change and gives a little more information about why they would choose death over assimilation.

· I think that there really wasn’t any clear-cut antagonist in the movie, but rather these two cultures divided by differences and nearly infinite misunderstandings. The Jesuits had a mission to “save” the natives by bringing them to God, whereas the natives had their own mission to defend their ways of life.

· From time to time predominately the tribe would connive as to how to kill the “black robe”. Most thought of him as a demon, and that he was, as you will see in these two clips, trying to “Steal their spirits”.

· One thing that I enjoyed most about the movie was the believability of the natives. There was a certain rawness to their characters that isn’t really seen too much in these types of movies. For the most part, this whole movie was in Algonquin which I think helps that believability. In a lot of these movies they have natives talking in English, between each other even, just to be more audience friendly, but this really was meant to be seen as a realistic showing.

· “It took over four years to find financing for the film. No American studio was interested in doing it because it was about religion, so eventually the finance was drummed up from European and Canadian sources…”

· “The ferocity of the torture scenes prompted accusations of racism from Native Americans. However, {the writer} Brian Moore, who had done extensive research on the subject, had actually toned down the documented violence for both his book and {the} screenplay.”

· Really, I think that the movie was before its time. 15 years ago, it was probably seen pretty harsh, and a little too realistic in a sense. But I think that if it was released today, they would have had a lot more to show now since realistic movies on historical events are a lot more looked up to; and since the wide scale audiences have become a lot more desensitized to movie violence.

· Most people who posted on IMDB seemed to really like “Black Robe”. It got a 7.2 which is considerably high. Most comments shared my opinion about the movie. There really was a lot beneath the surface of the storyline. You really get a feel of the characters and sympathize both sides. The Jesuit priest and the Algonquin chief were separated by cultures but you see late in the movie that they both have their own ways of life and I think they respect these differences in the conclusion.

I gave this movie a B for entertainment. It had a great balance of action and kept my interest the whole way through. And I gave it an A for historical value. Really the only flaw that I saw in research was that the Algonquians had a much more complicated vocabulary than depicted in the movie. It seems that everyone had a lot of positive things to say about how accurate this movie was in a historical context though.